Coping with the marrow glut

We've got marrows coming out of our ears! Despite the lousy weather this summer (and the overproduction of slugs in both garden and allotment) we have a glut of lovely golden yellow marrows. So it's time to experiment...

Marrow Chutney
I actually started out following a random Marrow Chutney recipe but it looked uninteresting and rather bland as it was cooking;  there was other garden produce sitting around waiting to be used so I just started chucking it in. The final recipe is something like the following:
Start with a large marrow and peel, de-seed and cube it, I left it overnight with salt scattered over it to remove water. After a good rinse it went into a jam-making pan (which I am fairly sure has a proper name that currently escapes me) and I started cooking it with white wine vinegar and sugar. In went some chopped fresh ginger, chopped apples, shallots and onions and a handful of dried mixed fruit. At this stage it looked very unchutney-like and pale so I halved some red and green cherry tomatoes and some physalis from the greenhouse and added them for the colour (and flavour??).
Once it had simmered for a while and was starting to look gloopy, I added some pickling spices in muslin to add to the flavour and simmered a while longer before bottling. Chutney tends to need a few months for the flavours to develop and intensify so this will be one for Christmas - and no doubt a useful Christmas present for people too!

As this only used one marrow and five more were waiting to be used in the kitchen I decided to try making Marrow Jam. The lack of wild plums this year because of the rubbishy weather means we need something for the toast - I wasn't convinced about this - marrow jam - really??! But its worth trying at least once.

Marrow Jam
This is one recipe I have followed properly - thanks Hugh for a nice River Cottage recipe.  I used ground ginger rather than fresh and added enough so that there was a distinctly gingery smell. I admit this is mainly because the thought of marrow jam is pretty unappealing - it sounds tasteless so the ginger was to address this.  I did try some when bottling it, and there is no taste of marrow in the final jam. I'm not sure what it tastes of but I really like it. The real test will be if the kids ask for it on their toast instead of crabapple...